The Best Thing
by Senashenta
Summary: Xandrie and Jory have been Bonded for years, and share everything; love, hate, successes and defeats. And even insanity.


**Disclaimer:** Valdemar and concepts belong to Mercedes Lackey. This fic and Original Characters belong to their author.

**Notes:** Random one-shot madness ahoy… and when I say "madness" I really mean "madness"… ^^;; (This is what happens when I get writers block. Fear me.)

The title is from the song "The Best Thing" by Savage Garden. While I was writing this I kept thinking about the line in it that goes "sometimes sanity takes vacation time on me" and I kept drawing a blank on the title so…

Oh, everyone tell me who was the Herald and who was the Companion! I wrote it so that it could be seen either way, with Jory as the Companion or the Herald and with Xandrie the same way, but it'd be interesting to see how everyone interpreted it.

Also, Jory's full name is Jordain, but that doesn't really matter. Just a side note, I guess.

**THE BEST THING  
By Senashenta**

The trees were orange, and somewhere in the depths of my mind I knew it wasn't right. Most likely, the color flaw had to do with the sun that was currently setting, visible now as only a sliver of red across the horizon, but I couldn't seem to consciously make that connection.

A gust of wind blew, making the snow rise and dance in a circle around us, and I sneezed when flakes tickled the end of my nose. Jory didn't even shiver, which would have worried me normally, but I just couldn't seem to find my way to that emotion.

I knew that I should have been feeling something. Anything.

But I was far beyond such mundane things.

How long had we been there, standing in a snowdrift to our knees and just waiting placidly for the Shadow-Lover to take us away? Days… weeks… months… maybe even years? Surely not, though it seemed to have been at least twice that long. And yet I could also say that the time had passed in only the space of a breath or the blink of an eye.

The cold of the Pelagir no longer reached either of us, despite our lack of shelter and winter clothing. We had no blankets, we had no fire, and we had nothing to protect us from the stinging northern winds.

And yet we stood and watched the sunset, heedless of the biting ice and snow.

I vaguely wondered whose idea it had been to flee to the forest in the first place, but I could no longer distinguish my mind from Jory's and no answer was coming from either of us. In fact, my thoughts may or may not have been my own anymore, as everything was a jumbled mess inside our respectively shared consciousness.

I couldn't remember who had descended into madness first.

Jory or myself?

Who knew?

Surely I should have, but somehow I didn't. Not that it mattered, as the two of us had shared everything since our Bonding together so many years before. Everything, apparently, including insanity.

Perhaps Foresight wasn't a Gift after all, but a curse…

I hadn't thought about it before, but insanity wasn't as bad as I would have imagined. We didn't scream for no reason, we weren't violent toward others, we didn't ramble in foreign tongues and we hadn't become overly paranoid for imagined reasons.

Instead, it was a state of mind that was oddly comforting.

Peace reigned, though at the edge of it was a dangerous seething of shadows that threatened to spill over into the light of our combined awareness. And that, I think, was probably why we had left our home and traveled north.

Jory… or was it me…? We had both been afraid of hurting those closest to us, should the darkness grow all-consuming. It was a frightening idea, but somewhere deep under our respective skins there were monstrous versions of ourselves waiting for the opportunity to claw their way to the surface.

We could sense it, Jory and I, though each other.

I could sense it from him.

He was the one whose mind had slipped first.

Or had his mind been drawn into madness by mine, and I was the one who was truly insane?

Another vague moment of _real _coherence, and I considered the possibility that our friends and comrades were looking for us. Certainly before we had vanished in the middle of the night they had been worried, and they had been trying for months to work us out of our downward spiral.

Would they go so far as to chase us into the Pelagir, and force us to return home?

I hoped not, despite how desperately my heart yearned to be there.

I wanted them to leave us alone.

I wanted them to come, swiftly, and wrap us in warmth and love and take us back to where we belonged.

I wanted them to forsake us to the frozen north, afraid of what we had become.

I wanted them to remember us for what we had been in the past…

Had a Herald and Companion, in the past, ever succumbed to a slip in sanity? I should have known the answer to that question as well, but I couldn't find my way to remembering. Jory's thoughts were too loud in my head to allow me that luxury.

Or was it that _my_ thoughts were too loud in _his_ head?

_:Xandrie, the birds are singing, still.:_ Jory told me.

I couldn't hear them at first, but I knew they were there. They had been singing ever since the frightening moment we had realized our own madness, and were always present, no matter how thickly we Shielded ourselves.

_:I know.:_ I responded.

The tittering laugh of the spiteful creatures mocked us, but it was a song that only Jory and I could hear, and they were birds that no one—not even the two of us—could see, though we were aware of their searing gazes upon us at all times.

They never showed themselves.

Perhaps this was out of fear of what we may do to them, or perhaps it was because they did not exist and were in reality a product of our already twisted thoughts. I knew the second was true, as it was what the small part of me that had not drifted into insanity was whispering, over and over again, to both myself and my Soul-Brother. But I had trouble believing the murmurs of my former self, as I had already sworn that, should the birds ever choose to appear, I would strike them down without so much as a word of warning.

They knew this. They had heard me when I first made the vow.

Fear made them remain in the shadows, mingling with our dangerous counterparts, the other halves of our respective personalities. Or they were nothing, and could not show themselves at all.

Fear or nothing…

_I_ was afraid, I realized. Afraid of the darkness that seemed to have overtaken us.

How had it happened, or, for that matter, _when_?

I couldn't even decipher enough from the muddled jumble that was my thoughts and his, mingled together, to tell if we had lost out battle with madness in that lifetime or the last. Or the next.

It had to have been the next.

It had to have been.

We had died already in this lifetime, hadn't we? Struck down in a border skirmish? We had been caught in the middle of it, finding ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had died quickly… hadn't we?

No.

I was thinking about my last life. Or Jory was thinking of his. Which was it?

I couldn't even remember if I had been a Herald in my past life. Had I..? Had I _ever_ been a Herald? A Companion? Had I ever been in a border skirmish? Had I ever died, or was I an immortal being of the stars?

Any normal person would have brushed that thought aside, but somehow it didn't seem impossible for us.

The sun dipped past the trees and day became night, mirroring the transition that had occurred in us over the prior months. I turned to look at Jory, he who had been with me since the beginning—or was it the end? He had always been there. I couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been.

Our gazes met, two sets of eyes glittering in the dark.

A chill lit the air, tingling along my spine and his.

This was it.

I could Feel it, as could he.

And we would face Him calmly, without tears and without begging or pleading.

Perhaps, after a time, we would be reborn.

Would madness follow us into the next lifetime?

_:I love you, Jory.:_

_:I love you, Xandrie.:_

And finally, the Shadow-Lover took us both.


End file.
